what is ransomware attacks
Like many other hacker tools, over the years, DDoS attacks have evolved from fun for bullies and romantics into a tool for criminals and unscrupulous political rivals. Germany is no exception.
Cyber attacks - targeted actions against Internet servers - are increasingly becoming an instrument of economic or political pressure.
The general public first learned about the so-called DDoS attacks (English - “distributed attack leading to denied access”) in 2000. Then hackers paralyzed the work of a number of popular servers, including Amazon.com, Yahoo! and eBay. One can only speculate about the motives of hackers, but most experts believe that then hackers were guided mainly by sports interest. In recent years, the situation has changed.
Zombie computers
The essence of a DDoS attack is as follows. A huge number of so-called "junk requests" begin to arrive on the server chosen by the hacker as a victim. This causes an overload, as a result of which the website becomes inaccessible to real users. He either can no longer recognize their requests due to "noise", or simply "collapses."
Often, to send out false requests, a hacker uses computers of other users who are not even aware that they are becoming accomplices in a crime. Attackers send a Trojan to computers of third parties, which is activated after the receipt of the corresponding command. Computers of such users are called "zombies", and the network of such PCs is called bonet.
Against the media and dissent
In Russia, they started talking about DDoS with the onset of the election year. The websites of the organizers of the "March of the Dissent", radio "Echo of Moscow", and the publication "Kommersant" were attacked. Soon after the escalation of the conflict around the monument to the Soldier-Liberator in Tallinn, the servers of Estonian government bodies were littered with garbage requests. As a result, the authorities were forced to close their online representations for a while.
New ransomware tool
User in front of a computer screen
For DDoS attacks, hackers use computers of innocent users
In Germany, the problem of DDoS attacks is also familiar firsthand. According to Matthias Gärtner, a spokesman for the Office of Information Technology Security under the Ministry of Internal Affairs, extortionists most often resort to such methods.
"A few years ago, DDoS attacks were mainly the tool of romantic hackers," Gertner said in an interview with DW-WORLD.DE. However, these times are long gone. "
DDoS attacks have become a tool for real criminals, and most often international gangs resort to it. To complicate the work of the investigating authorities, hackers use the north, located in another country, to conduct an attack on the website of a German company. And zombie computers are scattered all over the planet.
Easier to pay
At the same time, the scale of such crimes in the German Ministry of the Interior is not taken. As in the classic cases of extortion, the real figure is much higher than the number of complaints received. Many entrepreneurs believe that it is better to pay off than to risk the reputation of the company.
Mathias Gertner recalls the case when a company, deciding not to succumb to blackmail, paid for it with a loss of customers. The extortionists published on one of the Internet sites the credit card numbers of customers that they had previously “removed” from the company's server.
Gun of extremists
Neofascists in Germany
Extremists are increasingly resorting to hackers
DDoS hackers did not stay away from politics. According to the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, representatives of the right and left extremist scenes regularly exchange such attacks. So, in November 2006, a site was subjected to a powerful DDoS attack, on which several leftist extremist groups called for the disruption of the neo-fascist march. True, the leftists turned out to be prepared for a virtual attack: the server managed to filter out spam requests. Left-wing organizations also systematically launch DDoS attacks on websites of right-wing extremists.
A spokesman for the Ministry of the Interior declined to report whether German government sites were heavily attacked by DDoS hackers.
"Government servers, like many others, are sometimes forced to repulse such attacks. However, to call specific numbers means to inform hackers about the degree of vulnerability of our sites," Mathias Gertner explained.